how to use USED harddrives

[wayne]

how do i use a harddrive that have been used?

i have a couple extra small sized harddrives that i pulled out of a bunch of old 486, pentium, and PII systems... some have harddrives that are big enough to salvage, like maybe 3gb or 7gb and 6gb and i think one had 10gb

how can i put it into a system where i can use it?... ive tried it but it never works for me... when i plug it into a motherboard, its like blank... i try loading win XP on the larger sized drives but it still doesnt work... ive tried different jumper settings, different IDE cables, but still doesnt work

the reason for this is i have a couple of old motherboards and processor i would like to use but i lack harddrives... another reason is i may take a 3gb harddrive and do a window mod on it and use that for mp3

another thing i need to know is how to add it on to my computer... for example, my main computer has a maxtor 120gb... if i decide to add a 10gb to make my harddrive memory have 130gb, how do i do it?... ive tried putting them on the same IDE cable, changed jumper settings, etc

how can i do this if these old harddrives already had windows loaded on them previously?

HARD DRIVES HATE ME

[Lord of Shadows]

Well, it wont simply add space to your existing hard drive, it would appear as a new drive on whatever os you have with a unique drive letter.

Open up your case, and find a free ide cable, if its plugged into the middle of the cable its a slave, if its the end of the cable its a master. It should say how to set up the jumpers on the hard drive, if not try to find the manufactorer's site. be sure you plug in the 4-pin molex cable as well (power cable) and boot up your comp. (btw cable select requires a special cable, if you have one set it to cs and it will find out where it is on the cable.)

If you just pulled it out of some old comp and wanna boot to it, your bios should allow you to change the boot sequence, should be something like 1st, 2nd, 3rd device, change your hdd-0 to hdd-1 to boot to it, or you could just unplug your good drive.

[wayne]

Well, it wont simply add space to your existing hard drive, it would appear as a new drive on whatever os you have with a unique drive letter.

Open up your case, and find a free ide cable, if its plugged into the middle of the cable its a slave, if its the end of the cable its a master. It should say how to set up the jumpers on the hard drive, if not try to find the manufactorer's site. be sure you plug in the 4-pin molex cable as well (power cable) and boot up your comp. (btw cable select requires a special cable, if you have one set it to cs and it will find out where it is on the cable.)

If you just pulled it out of some old comp and wanna boot to it, your bios should allow you to change the boot sequence, should be something like 1st, 2nd, 3rd device, change your hdd-0 to hdd-1 to boot to it, or you could just unplug your good drive.
how do i make it boot from my original harddrives OS than from the OS of the old harddrive i m installing?

[Ice Czar]

the master device on the primary IDE channel will be HDD 0 in the BIOS boot order
or more accurately that is the first location scanned for a HDD

I use old drives (2GB ect) as additional backup drives for this that and the other thing
smaller drives would make good practice for a window mod

[wayne]

the master device on the primary IDE channel will be HDD 0 in the BIOS boot order
or more accurately that is the first location scanned for a HDD

I use old drives (2GB ect) as additional backup drives for this that and the other thing
smaller drives would make good practice for a window mod
so i put the main harddrive on the primary IDE channel as master, second harddrive on the ide channel as slave, change the boot order to master HDD 0 and second HDD 1 and then i boot and when i get to windows, i format second hard drive?... i think i may have tried that but once i get it clear, and have time in a few days, i ll retry that again


yup, thats what i plan to do with spare small drives.. mods, hehe